Straight to the Heart

As I write this, Boris Johnson is anxiously waiting for the counting of votes to see if he is still the Mayor of London. Hundreds of Conservative and LibDem councillors have lost their seats. A senior Labour councillor has lost his seat to George Galloway’s Respect Party. It’s a magnificent reminder that human power is very fleeting.

That’s why I’m loving our new preaching series on the book of Revelation with its constant reminder that God’s power never fades away.

When John saw a vision of Jesus in Revelation 1, he recognised him as the person Daniel had described as “one like the son of man.” Daniel had dreamed a prophetic dream in 553BC in which he saw the Babylonian Empire rise and fall, the Persian Empire rise and fall, Alexander the Great’s Empire rise and fall, and the Roman Empire rise and fall. Then he had seen “one like the son of man” found a different kind of Kingdom which would conquer the whole world and which would never fade away. Jesus the Messiah would be the King of kings, the Lord of lords, the Mayor of mayors and the Councillor of councillors.

Jesus isn’t waiting for any votes to be counted today. Let’s worship him as the Ruler whose term in power will never come to an end!

This week sees the launch of “Straight to the Heart of 1&2 Samuel”, the eighth title in my series of devotional commentaries. To celebrate, I’m posting a couple of sample chapters for you to read. Enjoy!

STRAIGHT TO THE HEART OF 1&2 SAMUEL

WHY GOD MAKES PEOPLE CRY (1 SAMUEL 1:1-28)

“In her deep anguish Hannah prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly.” (1 Samuel 1:10)

I was recently reading the Roald Dahl novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” to my young children. If you’ve never read it, it’s the story of an eccentric chocolate manufacturer who invites five lucky children to visit his factory with a view to installing one of them as his heir. Whilst Charlie is polite and instantly loveable, the other four children are definitely not. The greedy Augustus Gloop gets swept away by a chocolate river, the spoilt Veruca Salt gets thrown out with the garbage, and the gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde comes to an appropriately sticky end. At this point one of my children turned to me and said, “I really hope that Charlie is the one left at the end and not Mike Teavee.” It suddenly dawned on me that my children didn’t know the unwritten storybook rule: bad things only happen to bad people, and good things only happen to good people.

I know the rule. You know the rule. But that makes the first chapter of 1 Samuel all the more surprising. It appears that, like my children, God doesn’t know this unwritten rule, or if he does know then he decides to break it in this chapter and very often in our own lives too. If God is good then why does he make so many good people cry?

Think about it. Peninnah means Pearlor Ruby, but there was nothing beautiful about the second wife of Elkanah. She taunted Hannah for her infertility and made her life a misery, yet God blessed her with many sons and daughters. Hannah means Grace, and she lived up to her name, yet God rewarded her with trouble and a monthly cycle of disappointment. She thought she had married a godly man – one of the few men in backslidden Israel who still came to worship at the Lord’s Tabernacle in Shiloh – yet after their wedding he embraced the same polygamy as his neighbours and proved crassly insensitive towards her pain in verse 8. Even Eli, Israel’s high priest and thirteenth judge, accused Hannah of drunkenness and tried to throw her out of the Tabernacle. The writer wants us to react against this apparent injustice, so he shocks us twice in verses 5 and 6 by telling us that “the Lord had closed Hannah’s womb.” It wasn’t chance and it wasn’t the Devil. It was the Lord, and he did it for a reason.

Hannah wasn’t the first woman in the Old Testament whom the Lord had made infertile. He had done the same thing to the wives of the three great patriarchs – Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel – as well as to the mother of Samson and the great-grandmother of David. In fact, a straight reading of the Old Testament so far suggests that anguish and infertility are often part of the training programme God devises to create the kind of women he can use.

You see, unlike Peninnah or Elkanah, Hannah was delivered from her backslidden culture through the abject misery which she endured. It turned her into one of the great praying women of the Old Testament, as she poured out her soul to the Lord in verse 15. She came to know God in verse 11 as Yahweh Tsabâôth – the Lord of Armies, or Lord Almighty – despite the fact that Israel had been overrun by the Philistines and the rest of her fellow Hebrews disregarded him as the weak and outdated deity of yesteryear. It caused her to pray such gritty, persistent, anguished prayers of faith that she became the perfect filament God could use to display his glory to the whole of Israel.

The chronology of the book of Judges suggests that the events described in this chapter took place at roughly the same time that Samson died as a prisoner of the Philistines. The writer wants us to notice the deliberate parallels between the baby Hannah was to conceive and the judge who had just failed.  Samson had been born to a barren woman, had been called to be a Nazirite from his mother’s womb and had been called to lead Israel to freedom from the Philistines, but had failed. Samuel would be born to another barren woman, would be a true Nazirite, and would succeed in delivering Israel from the Philistines in chapter 7. Even their names sounded similar, except that Samuel meant Heard By God and spoke of gratitude for prayers answered in the past and prophesied more answers to prayer in the future. If Hannah had not graduated from the Lord’s school of humility by learning lessons through her suffering, she would never have handed her little boy over to Eli to grow up in the Tabernacle without her.  Because she did so, she became the kind of person God could use.

Nobody except you fully knows the sorrows in your own life, but if God has made you cry like Hannah then I hope you find comfort in the promises of this chapter. I hope it helps you trust that God’s delays today are a sign that he has something far better in store for you tomorrow. I hope you notice that the writer doesn’t bother to name Peninnah’s sons and daughters, or the five children who were born to Hannah after she handed over Samuel in 2:21. Those children born out of ease and comfort had not been prayed for and blessed through the Lord making their mother cry. They were not like Samuel, who would become the greatest judge of Israel, the deliverer of God’s People, the Lord’s prophet, and the kingmaker who would transition Israel from a loose confederation of tribes led by judges into a centralised monarchy. I hope this chapter helps you understand that God has made you cry because your tears are watering the earth of your life to produce a harvest of grace beyond your wildest dreams. After all, if God is big enough for you to blame in your troubles, then he is also big enough for you to trust him in the midst of them too.

If God grants you encouragement through this chapter, then follow Hannah’s lead in verse 18 when she responds to Eli’s blessing with faith and joy. Although nothing has changed visibly and she has only the word of God’s priest to suggest that her prayer has been heard at all, she dries her eyes and breaks her fast and starts worshipping the Lord.

As you worship alongside her, you will become the kind of person God can use.

For more sample chapters or to buy discounted copies of “Straight to the Heart of 1&2 Samuel” and “Straight to the Heart of John”, go to www.philmoorebooks.com The books are now available on Amazon and in all good Christian bookstores.

Next week sees the launch of “Straight to the Heart of John”, the ninth title in my series of devotional commentaries. To celebrate, I’m posting a few sample chapters for you to read every couple of days in the run-up to the titles being available on Amazon and in bookstores. Enjoy!

STRAIGHT TO THE HEART OF JOHN

INTRODUCTION: LOOK AND SEE THE LIVING GOD

“These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31)

John may have been the only one of Jesus’ twelve disciples not to die a violent death, but don’t let that fool you that his lot in life was easy. As the last surviving disciple by far, he was burdened by a barrage of unwanted attention.

The enemies of Christianity, particularly the Romans, had marked him out as a dangerous eyewitness to the life of Jesus. He had been there when Jesus healed the blind and fed the hungry, there when he was nailed to a Roman cross, and there when he left behind an empty tomb. John hadn’t stopped preaching about what he had seen for sixty years, and he knew that if old age didn’t claim his life soon then his increasingly agitated enemies surely would. In around 90AD, just before the Emperor Domitian exiled him to the Greek island of Patmos, John decided it was time to preserve his memories in a gospel. Irenaeus, who was taught by John’s young helper Polycarp, informs us that “John the Lord’s disciple, the one who leaned back on his chest, published a gospel whilst living at Ephesus in Asia … John made his permanent home in Ephesus until the time of Trajan.” When John saw that his time witnessing on earth was nearly over, he wrote his gospel as a witness to generations yet to come.

John was also being watched by the many false teachers who had latched themselves onto the growing Christian faith like limpets to the hull of a mighty warship. Some of them played down Jesus’ divinity while others played down his humanity, but both groups found common ground in their resentment towards the aged apostle who refuted their theories with facts about the Jesus that he knew. Note the way John fills his gospel with vivid eyewitness descriptions, and with words like seeing and knowing and bearing testimony and the truth. John wants his readers to appreciate that he knew the real Jesus – fully God and fully man – and that his gospel exposes the speculations of people who try to reshape the Messiah in a mould of their own making.

Most concerning of all, John was troubled by the starstruck gaze of the many well-meaning Christians who hailed him as their hero. Note the way he writes his gospel in a manner which prevents us from placing him on a pedestal as a saint. Matthew, Mark and Luke mention John and his brother James a total of thirty-nine times in their gospels, but John never mentions himself or his brother by name at all! He might mention less famous disciples such as Philip and Thomas and Nathanael, but he purposely redirects his readers’ attention away from himself by making anonymous references to “the disciple Jesus loved”.[7] As for the rumour among his fans that he might not die until Jesus returned in glory, he quashes their misguided hero worship in 21:23. In a world where too many people looked at John instead of Jesus, he wrote this gospel to plead with each of his readers to Look and see the Living God!

All of this makes John’s gospel essential reading for anyone who wants to know the real Jesus today. Like us, John had copies of the gospels which Matthew, Mark and Luke had written earlier, but he believed that we needed something more. They are known as the ‘Synoptic’ gospels because they all ‘share a common perspective’ on the life and ministry of Jesus, whereas the second-century church leader Clement of Alexandria explains that John’s gospel takes a different view: “John, perceiving that the outward facts had been set forth in those gospels, urged on by his friends and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual gospel.” John doesn’t tell us that Jesus told parables, drove out demons, healed lepers, was transfigured or prayed agonised prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane. Instead, he duplicates as little material as possible in order to tell unrecorded stories which open our eyes to see the real Jesus in his untold glory.

In chapters 1-4, John uses fresh incidents from Jesus’ early ministry to encourage us to look at Jesus alone. In chapters 5-12, he uses more new stories to teach us to look at who Jesus really is.In chapters 13-17, he records Jesus’ handover teaching to his disciples and encourages us to look at what Jesus has given you. This leads into his conclusion in chapters 18-21, where he gives final reasons to look at Jesus and win. All along the way, he punctuates his gospel with frequent exhortations to “Look!” and “Come and see!” and “Open your eyes!” to see the Living God.

If you are unsure what you believe about Jesus of Nazareth, then this should all strike you as very good news. John wrote this gospel to give you a ringside seat from which to watch the Galilean carpenter whose message changed the world. Mark writes to tell us what Jesus did, and Matthew and Luke write to explain why Jesus did it, but John’s main concern is to help us discover who Jesus is and what it means for us to follow him today. He tells us in 20:31 that he wrote this gospel for you and me, so that “you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” 

If you already believe in Jesus but want to know him more, then this should also strike you as very good news. The most accurate Greek manuscripts of 20:31 use a present tense which can be literally translated “so that you may go on believing that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by going on believing you may go on having life in his name.” Read that way, John is telling us that he wrote his gospel to turn our head knowledge about Jesus into genuine experience of new life through him. 

So sit back and enjoy the life-changing message of John’s gospel. It was the message which the early Christians needed to hear in the face of Roman persecution, false teaching and hero-worship, and it’s still the message we need to hear amidst the pressures of today.

John therefore hands us his gospel, still as fresh as when he wrote it, and tells us to do the same as his first-century readers. He invites us to fix our eyes on the Jesus that he knew. He tells us to look and see the Living God.

For more sample chapters or to buy discounted copies of “Straight to the Heart of 1&2 Samuel” and “Straight to the Heart of John”, go to www.philmoorebooks.com

Next week sees the launch of “Straight to the Heart of 1&2 Samuel”, the eighth title in my series of devotional commentaries. To celebrate, I’m posting a few sample chapters for you to read every couple of days in the run-up to the titles being available on Amazon and in bookstores. Enjoy!

STRAIGHT TO THE HEART OF 1&2 SAMUEL

INTRODUCTION: THE KIND OF PERSON GOD CAN USE

“The Lord has sought out a man after his own heart and appointed him ruler of his people.” (1 Samuel 13:14)

If you want to understand the basic message of 1 and 2 Samuel, then you may find it helpful to think of Thomas Edison. He may not have been the original inventor of the light bulb, but he built tirelessly on the work of others to find the kind of filament which would make it an invention all the world could use. 

Thomas Edison’s experiments in 1879 were very much like the book of Judges, which covers the two and a half centuries leading up to the start of 1 Samuel. He passed electricity through many different filaments in the hope of finding one which burned brightly in the darkness. Many of them failed to do so – like Barak, the man God called to display his glory during a Canaanite invasion in around 1257BC. He was so unwilling to let God use him that God had to show his power through a foreign woman instead.

Other filaments shone as brightly as Thomas Edison intended, but failed to burn as long and consistently as was needed. They were like Gideon, who displayed God’s saving power when he defeated the Midianites in about 1210BC, but who quickly succumbed afterwards to the sins of idolatry and polygamy. They were like Jephthah, who shone brightly for the Lord when he routed the Ammonite army in about 1107BC, yet knew God so dimly that he went home and made a human sacrifice of his daughter in a misguided attempt to glorify him.

Finally, the Lord told a barren mother that she would conceive and give birth to Israel’s twelfth and greatest judge so far. Samson would “be a Nazirite, dedicated to God from the womb” and he would “take the lead in delivering Israel from the hands of the Philistines.” He would be like the filament which Thomas Edison produced from carbonised cotton thread and which made him so excited that he filed for a patent for his light bulb at the end of 1879. Like that filament, however, Samson also proved to be as flawed as the eleven judges who had gone before. When the power of God came upon him, it revealed he was still governed by his lust and anger instead of by the Lord. Thomas Edison’s cotton filament destroyed itself after only thirteen hours. He had still not found the kind of filament he could use.

Thankfully, the message of 1 and 2 Samuel is that God did not give up on his search. He was determined to reveal his glory by finding the kind of person he could use. We read in 1 Samuel 1-7 that he found a humble person in the form of the fourteenth and final judge, Samuel, and that he used him to do everything which Samson had failed to do. We read in 1 Samuel 8-15 that he looked for an obedient person, and that when the first king, Saul, failed to be such a person God revealed a better candidate in a shepherd-boy named David. In 1 Samuel 16-31, we discover the lengths God went to in order to make David into a pure person so that he would be the kind of person he could use.

The story continues in 2 Samuel 1-10, as David begins his reign and proves himself to be a person who loves God’s name. He is as different from Saul as Samuel was from Samson, like the filament of carbonised bamboo which Thomas Edison discovered in 1880 and which burned for over 1200 hours, marking the invention of the first commercially viable electric light bulb. God has finally found the kind of person he can use, and 1 and 2 Samuel looks like it has reached a happy ending.

But it hasn’t. David sins, and badly. He fails the Lord more dramatically than Barak, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson and Saul put together. 2 Samuel 11-24 ends the story by telling us that God is looking for a repentant person who admits his sin and looks to a better, brighter Saviour than King David. The Hebrew Old Testament groups 1 and 2 Samuel with the books which are known as ‘the Former Prophets’ because the writer always intended us to receive his work as more than just a history book. He prophesies the coming of someone far greater than David, God’s anointed one – the word in Hebrew is messiah. He prophesies that David’s dynasty will produce a greater Son who will perfectly fulfil the message of these chapters and become the ultimate Person God can use.

1 and 2 Samuel must have been completed some time after 930BC, since they refer repeatedly to ‘Israel’ and ‘Judah’ as two distinct kingdoms. They must also have been completed some time before 925BC, since they tell us that Ziklag belonged to the kings of Judah “to this day”, and we know that Ziklag was annexed by the Egyptians in that year. This means that the readers of 1 and 2 Samuel had four hundred years to wait before God gave them a commentary on its meaning after the Jews returned from exile in Babylon. He gave them 1 and 2 Chronicles, the last book of the Hebrew Old Testament,  which the Greek Septuagint translation simply entitles ‘The Things Which Were Omitted’. The author of 1 Chronicles intended his writing to serve as a supplement to 1 and 2 Samuel, and he deliberately fills in some of the blanks in order to help us understand its underlying message. He takes a selective view of the same incidents in the life of David and uses them to point to a better Messiah who will be the greatest filament of them all. 

So get ready for the message of 1 and 2 Samuel, which are as much a personal biography of Samuel, Saul and David as they are a national history of Israel and Judah. If you read them and respond to their message – imitating Samuel’s humility and David’s obedience, purity, passion for God’s name, and repentance when he sinned – then God will enable you to take your own place in the great drama which he is still performing through Jesus, his Messiah. He will fill you with his power and make you glow brightly in this dark world to the praise of his all-surpassing glory. 

Get ready to be part of God’s great salvation story. Get ready to let him shape you into the kind of person he can use.

For more sample chapters or to buy discounted copies of “Straight to the Heart of 1&2 Samuel” and “Straight to the Heart of John”, go to www.philmoorebooks.com

The “Straight to the Heart” series of devotional commentaries is having twins. The due date is 1st May and we’re very excited about these two babies.

“Straight to the Heart of 1&2 Samuel” is about God’s search for the kind of person he can use. When Samson failed, he found Samuel. When Saul failed, he found David. When David failed, he lovingly restored him and used him again. God is still looking for the kind of person he can use, and this book will help you become the kind of person he is looking for.

“Straight to the Heart of John” is about Jesus. Big time. Whereas Mark wrote to tell us WHAT Jesus did, and Matthew and Luke wrote to explain WHY Jesus did it, John’s main concern was to help us to discover WHO Jesus is. He gives us a ringside seat from which to watch the Galilean carpenter whose message changed the world. This book will show you what it means for us to follow him today.

So join in the celebrations of the birth of these two new volumes in the “Straight to the Heart” series. To read sample chapters or to purchase copies online, go to www.philmoorebooks.com/books

Happy Easter weekend! It’s 1,982 years ago this year that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified in Jerusalem. Historians agree that his corpse went missing three days later. People have been doubting, debating and discovering how it did so ever since.

As a celebration of Easter, I am posting two chapters from my commentary”Straight to the Heart of Matthew”which explore what we should do with our doubts and debating at Easter time. I posted one on Thursday and I’m posting this second one today in the hope that they will help non-Christians to process what happened that first Easter weekend and encourage Christians to celebrate what they believe.

Have a very happy Easter!

“The angel said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said.” (Matthew 28:5-6)

The last chapter of Matthew’s gospel is where he wants you to doubt. In fact, he gives you permission to do so. As he draws his five-act drama to a close with a short concluding chapter, he wants your wholehearted faith or your considered refusal. What he doesn’t want is the dithering discipleship which so many mistake for genuine Christianity. That’s why he tells us in verse 17 that some of the disciples “doubted” Jesus after his resurrection. He wants to make it easy for us to search our own hearts and to count the cost of his message, because Jesus is after our everything. It was not wrong for some of the Eleven to doubt him when he gave them the Great Commission, because Jesus’ call to lay down our lives for his Kingdom Revolution deserves weighty consideration.

Some Christians feel uncomfortable with the idea of doubting their faith, but that’s the very reason why so much second-rate obedience and bargain-basement discipleship masquerades as conversion to Christ. The message of the Kingdom demands our complete surrender or none at all, and only those who have grappled with this truth are ready to pour out their lives in its cause. The empty tomb meant that the lives of the Jews, the Romans, the women and the disciples could never be the same again. They needed to stop and doubt and consider and decide, because the resurrection was not a private affair. It was the public declaration that Jesus Christ is supreme King of the universe and that we need to lay down our lives in his service.

Non-Christian readers tend to assume that they do not live by faith at all, but Matthew shows us that unbelievers are never non-believers. The Jews and the Romans did not try to suppress the message of the empty tomb because they had no beliefs, but because they were so blinkered in their beliefs that they refused to doubt them even in the face of incontrovertible evidence.  I find Tim Keller very helpful on this point: “All doubts, however sceptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternate beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B. For example, if you doubt Christianity because ‘There can’t be just one true religion’, you must recognise that this statement is itself an act of belief. If you went to the Middle East and said, ‘There can’t be just one true religion,’ nearly everyone would say, ‘Why not?’ The reasons you doubt Christianity’s Belief A is because you hold unprovable Belief B. Every doubt, therefore, is based on a leap of faith.” Matthew urges his readers to doubt their doubts as much as their beliefs, because doubt can save us from unbelief.

The Romans tried to ignore the empty tomb, but doubt quickly exposes their story as unbelief. If the soldiers had been asleep on their watch then Roman law demanded that they pay for it with their lives. But the governor let them walk free.

The Jews tried to deny the resurrection, but doubt very quickly exposes their unbelief too. How could the disciples have stolen the body from a sealed tomb under Roman guard? Even if they did, why would they concoct a story like Matthew 28 which reports that two women were the first eye-witnesses to the resurrection, even though the testimony of women was considered suspect in the first-century law courts? Matthew must have been tempted to change his story to gloss over this unpalatable fact, but he didn’t. The only logical reason for him to tell the story this way is that it’s how it really happened.

Doubt also exposes the (relatively modern) speculation that the tomb was never empty at all. The Jews and the Romans did not even try to deny that Jesus’ body was missing, because they knew it was gone.  When Peter preached in Jerusalem seven weeks later on the day of Pentecost that Jesus had been raised from the dead, no one replied, “Jesus risen? Are you mad?! His corpse is still there in the tomb!” Instead, three thousand believed and were baptised, and by the time Matthew wrote his gospel there were over fifty thousand Christians in Jerusalem. Even outside of Jerusalem, Paul could challenge his hearers to believe in the resurrection of Jesus because “It was not done in a corner.” Doubt is a friend, not a foe, when considering the challenge of God’s Kingdom Revolution.

But if, after all our doubting, we keep coming back to the powerful conclusion that Jesus did indeed come back to life, then our lives can never be the same again. Some people refuse point blank to believe in the resurrection, but this is not doubt but stubborn unbelief. It is like Herod in Oscar Wilde’s play “Salome”, when he hears that Jesus is going round raising the dead. “I do not wish him to do that,” he complains. “I forbid him to do that. I allow no man to raise the dead. This man must be found and told that I forbid him to raise the dead.” We all have a little Herod inside of us, warring against the idea of resurrection and refusing to consider the implications it would bring.  But the facts will simply not yield to our petty protestations. Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead, and is now vindicated, glorified and enthroned as Lord of the universe.

The word which Matthew uses for doubting in verse 17 is distazô, the same word he used in 14:31 to describe Peter wavering between two opinions and sinking underwater. Matthew has encouraged you to doubt in this chapter because he wants you to put his gospel down with only one opinion left, not two. Will you live by the story circulated by the Romans and Jews? Will you live by the stubborn unbelief of the God-hating Western world? Or will you live by the thrilling conclusion which caused Matthew and friends to live, work and die for the sake of their risen King?

Paul told the Romans that “His unique identity as Son of God was shown by the Spirit when Jesus was raised from the dead, setting him apart as the Messiah, our Master.”

The risen Lord Jesus deserves our everything – beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Happy Easter weekend! It’s 1,982 years ago this year that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified in Jerusalem. Historians agree that his corpse went missing three days later. People have been doubting, debating and discovering how it did so ever since.

As a celebration of Easter, I am posting two chapters from my commentary”Straight to the Heart of Matthew”which explore what we should do with our doubts and debating at Easter time. I’m posting this one today and the second one on Easter Sunday in the hope that they will help non-Christians to process what happened that first Easter weekend and encourage Christians to celebrate what they believe.

Have a very happy Easter!

THE SIGN OF JONAH (Matthew 12:38-42)

“A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Matthew 12:39-40)

About two months after my conversion to Christ, I had a crisis of faith. Ironically, it was because I was trying to convert my friends. I had spent the previous evening with my friend Crazy Paul, who was a brilliant engineering student and the toughest atheist I knew. I had been praying for an opportunity to share the Gospel with him, and finally I had my chance. I told him the Gospel, backed it up with my testimony, and urged him to repent and follow Jesus.

What happened next is still a blur. All I remember is that I made some foolish and very unscientific speculations about creation, and that Crazy Paul lived up to his name. He went bright red, lost his temper and gave me both barrels on what he thought of my new-found faith. An hour later, I beat a hasty retreat from his bedsit, with my mind reeling and my faith in tatters. Since then, I’ve received plenty of verbal attacks for the Gospel, but nothing quite prepared me for the first one.

The following morning I sat in the Cambridge University History Library, my head still spinning from the night before. Was I following a lie? Were the last two months of walking with God just an illusion? Suddenly, I remembered the words Jesus spoke in Matthew 12 about ‘the sign of Jonah’. Of course! Christianity was not just a philosophy, like Buddhism, communism or existentialism, to be debated at leisure with my friends. It is faith in a person, and in a historical event, when Jesus of Nazareth died and three days later came back to life. Put simply, if Jesus died and rose again, then even if I couldn’t argue science with Crazy Paul, the Christian faith was still true. However, if he didn’t die and rise again, then I should face up to my non-Christian friends, confess I was wrong, and get back to my old life of binge-drinking and sin. Looking up, I saw shelf after shelf of the greatest history books money could buy, so I got up and quickly set to work. I was not going home until either I proved that Jesus didn’t rise again or I became satisfied that he did.

Perhaps Jesus didn’t die at all, or at the very least his body remained in the tomb? No, Matthew and friends wrote within thirty years of Jesus’ death, and I found that even their enemies concurred with their story that Jesus died, was buried, and three days later his body disappeared. The Romans and Jews who guarded the tomb didn’t even try to deny that this was true, but simply charged that the disciples had stolen his body. As the great Oxford professor Geza Vermes writes: “When every argument has been considered and weighed, the only conclusion acceptable to the historian must be that the opinions of the orthodox, the liberal sympathiser and the critical agnostic alike – and even perhaps of the disciples themselves – are simply interpretations of the one disconcerting fact: namely that the women who set out to pay their last respects to Jesus found to their consternation, not a body, but an empty tomb.”

Perhaps first-century people were simply gullible, then, and too readily assumed that a missing body meant a risen Christ? No, that was pretty unconvincing too. All the evidence suggested that first-century people were every bit as cynical as my friends and me, and I could find no other example of a ‘resurrection myth’ surrounding any of the other would-be Messiahs. NT Wright points out that “They knew better. Resurrection was not a private event. Jewish revolutionaries whose leader had been executed by the authorities, and who managed to escape arrest themselves, had two options: give up the revolution, or find another leader. Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option. Unless, of course, he was.”

Perhaps the disciples made up the whole story? But then why make the empty tomb so central to their message, and confess that unless Christ rose then their Gospel was a lie? Why would almost all of them lay down their lives for a claim which they knew was a scam? Even if they did, how would they possibly manage to convince the world that their preposterous story was true? Cambridge professor CFD Moule points out that the growth of the Church from a handful of Galilean peasants “rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of the resurrection,” and he asks “what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with?” It is not enough to say that a resurrection is impossible – we need to produce an alternative theory. There is simply nothing else which fits the size of the hole.

Then perhaps it wasn’t Jesus who really died? No, no one could fool a watching mother, and even if they did then it would still not explain how the corpse disappeared. Perhaps Jesus fainted and recovered later in the tomb? John Stott answered that one in no uncertain terms: “Are we really to believe … that after the rigours and pains of trial, mockery, flogging and crucifixion he could survive thirty-six hours in a stone sepulchre with neither warmth nor food nor medical care? That he could then rally sufficiently to perform the superhuman feat of shifting the boulder which secured the mouth of the tomb, and this without disturbing the Roman guard? That then, weak and sickly and hungry, he could appear to the disciples in such a way as to give them the impression that he had vanquished death? That he could go on to claim that he had died and risen, could send them into all the world and promise to be with them unto the end of time? That he could live somewhere in hiding for forty days, making occasional surprise appearances, and then finally disappear without explanation? Such credulity is more incredible than Thomas’ unbelief.”

I never converted Crazy Paul, but in some ways he converted me. He burst the delicate bubble of my early Christian excitement, and threw me hard against the ropes of study and apologetics and the stuff that sterner Christian faith is made of. He made me come of age and step into a confidence which was based on fact as well as faith, examination as well as experience.

Jesus tells us that the Queen of Sheba and the city of Nineveh were converted by lesser proof than this. He has given us compelling proof through his powerful Sign of Jonah.

One of the most common questions I get asked as a church leader is “where in the Bible does Jesus actually say that sex outside of marriage is wrong?” The follow-up question is usually “Why on earth does Jesus do so?” Let me be clear, it’s not just people who don’t want to follow Jesus who ask me that question. Non-Christian seekers and newborn Christians who are genuinely wanting to submit their lives to Jesus ask this question in all seriousness. And I think they need a serious answer.

First things first, Jesus doesn’t talk much about sex before marriage. If he did, you would begin to suspect that someone had doctored the text of the Bible because first-century Jews got married shortly after puberty (girls around 13 or 14, guys a little bit older). Consequently, sex before marriage simply wasn’t a major issue. In a sex-saturated culture like our own it’s hard to imagine 12 and 13-year-olds still acting like children and getting nervous rather than excited about their wedding night, but that’s how it was in the first-century Jewish culture which received Jesus’ firsthand teaching.

That said, adultery - sex outside of  marriage - was definitely an issue. The flip side of parents marrying off their children young, often to relative strangers, was that not all first-century marriages were happy. They were as predisposed as we are to look for sex with other people’s husbands and wives, albeit without some of the easy outlets which exist in our own culture to turn desire into action. This means we have to apply the three golden rules of understanding Scripture to Jesus’ teaching on sex and ask firstly “What did Jesus say to his original hearers?”, then secondly “What is Jesus therefore saying to us today?”, and thirdly “How does Jesus want me to apply that teaching to my life?”

Perhaps the most obvious passage to start with is Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:1-12. Jesus is talking about marriage and divorce, so we need to study the passage carefully for our own context, but some of what he says is very relevant to the question of sex before marriage. Jesus asks his listeners in verses 4 to 6, “Haven’t you read that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said ‘for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.” Let’s take a moment to consider what Jesus is teaching us here.

1) SEX IS GOOD!

Why is it that Christians seem louder at talking about how not to have than how to have sex?! It’s like the Monty Python sketch in the movie “The Meaning of Life”, where the Protestant male rejoices that he isn’t repressed like the Catholics whilst completely ignoring his wife’s come-to-bed-with-me eyes. Tony Campolo puts it even more starkly, claiming that “We were taught that sex is a dirty, filthy thing, and you should save it for the person you marry!”

Jesus, in contrast, points us back to Genesis 1-2, where the Lord creates human beings male and female, tells them to go forth and multiply and then declares that everything he has made (including sex) is “very good”. It’s passages like this one that led the writer of Hebrews 13:4 that  “the marriage bed should be kept pure”(not made pure) because sex within marriage is a wonderful gift from our Creator. If your understanding of Jesus’ teaching on sex gives you a low view of sex, then you have misunderstood him. Go and read the Old Testament book of Song of Songs if you need any encouragement to believe that God says sex is good!

2) SEX IS BETTER THAN GOOD

Now get ready for something shocking. Jesus tells us that sex isn’t just good, it also reflects something of the divine nature of God. He expects us to go back to the passage he quotes from Genesis 1:26-27 and read the whole verse: “God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our image and let them rule’ … So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Now read that again more slowly. It says God made human beings male and female in order that we might reflect his own image -  “our own image”, as he puts it, referring to the three-in-one Trinity. For mankind, it’s only two-in-one because we are not God, but it is two-in-one for a reason. Sex isn’t merely recreational and consensual. It is an act of worship through which two human beings reflect the image of God - a God who is more than one person and yet One.

You’ve got to understand this as a central plank of Jesus’ argument if you want to understand what he says. It’s why the Mosaic Law commanded the death penalty for relatively few offences compared to the other law codes of its day, and yet included sexual sin among the handful of crimes which were punishable by death. Jesus intervened to save an adulteress from being stoned to death in John 8, but he didn’t play down the seriousness of her crime when he warned her to “Go and leave your life of sin.” The Old Testament treated sexual sin as a form a of blasphemy, a vile parody of the Trinity, and Jesus endorsed and reinforced that view. Although he didn’t talk much about sex before marriage because it wasn’t much of an issue in his culture, he tightened up the Law when it came to adultery, declaring that even lusting after a person we are not married to puts us in danger of hell fire.

3) SEX DOESN’T BELONG TO US

Consequently, Jesus teaches in Matthew 19 that sex does not belong to us. That’s pretty controversial in our culture, where anything goes sexually (and the painful consequences are everywhere), but it stands to reason when we grasp that Sex Is Good and that Sex is Better than Good. If God is our Creator and he made humans male and female in order to reflect his glory to the world, then it stands to reason that he can tell us sex belongs to him. We are like renters who have been allowed to live in an apartment which belongs to God, not to ourselves, and God takes it very seriously when we start knocking down the walls of the apartment as if it all belongs to us.

That’s the bottom line when it comes to following Jesus’ words on sex. It’s a question of whether we believe our lives (sexual or otherwise) belong to him or to ourselves. If we want to live for Jesus, then he tells us that sex is even better than we thought. Not only can we enjoy it far better in its proper, God-created context, but we are also reflecting the glory of the Trinity when we do! But it also means that Jesus wants to be Lord of what we do in our bedroom (etc, etc!) in private, because our whole lives belong to him.

4) MARRIAGE IS GOD’S INVENTION AND NOT OURS

Jesus hasn’t finished. He has one more big thing to say. He doesn’t just talk about two becoming one, but starts to talk about a person leaving his parents and being united to his wife (note the order), and he tells us that when such a public marriage covenant takes place then God has joined the two marriage partners together in a way which human laws alone cannot separate. The disciples don’t know whether to be horrified that marriage is such a serious matter (they ask if it might be too holy a state to enter into at all in verse 10), or to be overjoyed that God’s plan for sex and marriage is so much better than the way these things are viewed in their culture (we can tell from the New Testament letters that this second option ultimately won their hearts). Jesus tells us that we have only understood what he says about sex if we are similarly overawed and overjoyed.

CONCLUSION

We have only looked at four short verses from one portion of Jesus’ teaching on sex, but what can we conclude? Jesus is clear that sex is reserved for lifelong marriage between one man and one woman, and that he created it to be incredible fun so that we would make love often and enjoy it - whilst reflecting the fact that God is far greater than a man or a woman. They are two-in-one, shining like the moon, whilst he is three-in-one, shining far more brightly like the sun.

If you are not living this way, then sex should not be a reason for you to reject Jesus but for you to accept him. Our culture is full of good reasons for bad sex, but Jesus promises that if we follow the Maker’s instructions then sex gets better. He also promises you forgiveness as he did the adulterous woman in John 8, telling you “I do not condemn you; now leave your life of sin.”

If you are not yet married but are trying to live Jesus’ way, then you should be encouraged. Jesus promises you that God greatly prizes your decision to remain celibate until you marry, and that he will bless you as a result. Perhaps he is already planning your reward. Proverbs 18:22 tells us that “He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favour from the Lord.”

And if you are married, then please don’t focus more on Jesus’ prohibitions on sex than you do on his great invitation. He encourages you to go and make love to your husband or wife to the glory of God! He tells you that some of your best worship should not be sung in church on a Sunday morning, but enjoyed in bed on a Sunday afternoon! In fact, shouldn’t you stop spending time reading this blog and go forth to apply it for the glory of the Triune God?!

I have been posting a series of blogs which draw on the life and example of William Booth to help us understand how to change the cities we live in. Wherever we live and whatever our circumstances, we all have plenty to learn from the founder of the Salvation Army who transformed late-nineteenth-century London through his radical lifestyle. I’ve been studying many of the best biographies to come up with Ten Things William Booth Did Which Changed The Face of His City. I believe that they are the things which we can do to change our cities too.

In the first two blogs in this series, I looked at Factor #1: Radical Personal Commitment to Jesus, at Factor #2 : Fierce Ambition for the Name of Jesus, and Factor #3 : Deep Humility. In this blog, I will look at factors #4, #5 and #6.

FACTOR #4: DEEP LOVE FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW JESUS

William Booth loved people like Jesus did. His success in changing Victorian Britain was really that simple. When a respectable lady saw a former prostitute weeping at his funeral, she asked her why she was crying. “You see, he cared for the likes of us,” came the reply. William Booth poured out his life to help the lowest of London’s low, but he made it clear that he did not consider his work to be a sacrifice since he was no better than they were.

FACTOR #5: A TIRELESS PASSION TO PUT THAT LOVE INTO ACTION

For William Booth, simply feeling compassion for London’s lost was not enough. The only love worth anything to him was the kind of love which leads to doing. “The great test of character is doing,” he told his friends on New Year’s Day 1869. “God, the Church and the world all estimate men not according to their sayings, feelings or desiring, but according to their doings.”

Consequently, his biographer Roy Hattersley described his lifestyle as ‘active Christianity’. Unlike most sleepy Victorian churchgoers, he believed in “the moral duty of God’s ministers to go out into the highways and byways and make them come in. His style of evangelism was a living reproach to every vicar in whose parish he preached and every minister whose circuit he invaded. ‘Go to the people with the message of salvation, instead of expecting them to come to you’” He and his followers “approached complete strangers in the street, and they thrust themselves, as well as their opinions, on everyone they met. It was the secret of their success and of their unpopularity … At a time when more conventional preachers waited to hear polite requests for redemption, he chose to take religion to the people.”

William Booth’s determination that London’s unsaved must hear the Gospel, whether they wanted to or not, made him extremely unpopular. The letters pages of Victorian newspapers such as “The Times” are full of complaints against Booth and his friends. Many churches even closed their doors to him, not letting him address their congregations, but this simply made him even more determined to preach to the vast unchurched crowds of the city instead. He published a pamphlet entitled “How to Reach the Masses with the Gospel” in which he set out his philosopy of ministry:

“We believe that God has given us a mission to the throngs in the great thoroughfare roaming about on the Sabbath day and all other days, thoroughly unconcerned about death, judgment and eternity … Our experience tells us that although their aversion to Chapels and Churches is as strong as can well be conceived, they will nevertheless eagerly listen to any speakers who will, with ordinary ability, in a loving and earnest manner set before them the truths of the Bible in the open air … If you will stop quietly in your church or chapel or meeting place, you may talk of religion forever and, beyond a little passing ridicule, the ungodly will let you alone … Only proclaim the truth at the gates of the city or in the crowded market place and they will gnash upon you with their teeth and hate you as they hated Him who went about all the cities and villages of Palestine.”

FACTOR #6: RAW COURAGE TO KEEP PROCLAIMING THE GOSPEL

Make no mistake about it, sharing the Gospel in Victorian London wasn’t easy. William Booth and his friends were subjected to hostile abuse almost every day. Nevertheless, Roy Hattersley writes that “He never felt shame, feared ridicule or flinched from danger.”

Booth wrote in his diary in 1868 that “If we opened the windows, mud and stones and occasional fireworks were thrown through. Consequently we had to sit and endure the stifling heat until it was impossible for delicate people to remain in the place. Sometimes trails of gunpowder were laid, the dress of one devoted sister was thus actually set on fire during the service.”  At first William Booth’s enemies contented themselves with ridiculing the preachers, tearing up their tracts, and throwing the shreds all over the speakers, but soon they graduated into throwing rotten potatoes, cabbages and filthy refuse. They graduated still further into throwing stones, eggs, dead rats, dead cats and whitewash. William Booth did not change nineteenth-century London by courting popularity but by being willing to be hated in order to proclaim the news of God’s great love through Jesus in such a way that nobody could shut their ears to its sound. In fact, Roy Hattersley concludes that “the attacks did the [Salvation] Army material good by turning vulgar cranks into heroic martyrs … The more the Salvation Army was prosecuted and persecuted, the more it prospered.”

That’s why William Booth refused to water down his public preaching when warned that many more would join his Salvation Army if he relaxed its strict demands. “I cannot soften conditions in order to attract men to the columns,”  he replied. As we end this blog, those are great words to challenge us today.

Do you want to see your city changed by the power of God? Then love people with Jesus’ love. Love them as much as William Booth did. Turn that love into a tireless passion to act on their behalf. Mix it with raw courage in order to keep proclaiming that Jesus died to save them.

If you do that then you will see your own city revived by God’s power. God is looking for loving, active, courageous men and women. He is far more passionate than we are to use us to change our cities.

The final installments of “How to Change Your City” will follow in the next few days.

America has woken up to the “Straight to the Heart” series of commentaries. There has been a sudden flurry of positive reviews for the series amongst US bloggers and Christian writers. There have been about a dozen very positive reviews in the past month alone and you can read one of them by clicking on the link below, although I do have to put the rave review in context: when I showed it to my wife and she read that I “gush with pastoral sensitivity”, she almost fell off her chair laughing!

Read the full review at http://vannostrand.wordpress.com/category/reviews/kregel/

Also, I’ll be on Twitter every day throughout Lent tweeting devotional thoughts from the books in the “Straight to the Heart” series, so find me on hashtag #Straight2Heart if you want to be inspired.